With advertising taking center stage as much as the football game Sunday, it seemed a good time to reflect on some of the most notorious pitch people to grace the metro Denver airwaves over the years.

Area residents remember well Jake Jabs, owner of American Furniture Warehouse, wrestling with tigers; Tom Shane, owner of the Shane Co., assuring you “you’ve got a friend in the jewelry business”; or “Dealin’ Doug” Moreland, owner of one of the largest dealerships in Denver, promising “nobody beats a Dealin’ Doug deal. Nobody.” There’s also the McDivitt law firm’s annoying, or endearing, frog (ribbit rhymes with McDivitt – get it?) 

And you couldn’t avoid the “Strong Arm” attorney Franklin D. Azar if you tried — his firm’s advertising is on local TV, radio, billboards, bus signs and sponsorships for the Denver Broncos, Avalanche, Rockies and Nuggets.

“We call that a persona,” said Darrin Duber-Smith, a senior lecturer at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “They’re either the most well-loved, or loathed, pitch people out there.

“It’s really subjective and the idea of annoying and ubiquitous (found everywhere) aren’t the same thing necessarily.”

The ins-and-outs of Super Bowl advertising: What's in it for Colorado TV stations?

Duber-Smith has been teaching the subject for decades, and specializes in issues around Super Bowl advertising. He uses the example of “Flo” for pitch people you either love or hate, but sure remember “Progressive Insurance” either way.

“People are annoyed by her, and I think she’s one of the greatest characters of all time,” said Duber-Smith.

A high-ranking station official with one of the three networks in Denver, who could only speak on background about proprietary business information, said they don’t get any complaints about the frequency of Azar ads. “And trust me, people regularly reach out about things that upset them.”

Azar told The Denver Gazette that if he had to choose a moniker today it’d likely be a different one.

“It’s just something for people to remember,” Azar said. “If I would have thought about it longer, I probably would have come up with something different. It just kind of snowballed.”

He’s been using the tag line “Strong Arm” for more than two decades. It started when he worked in Dallas with a former partner. The office was trying to compete with another personal injury law office that used “The Hammer” as its catch phrase.

His former partner never registered the name, so Azar did and brought it to Denver.

“A very small amount of the cases we get is from advertising; 60% or more is from former clients and word-of-mouth,” Azar said. “But also, you have to have your name out there or people forget about you. … We don’t even mention strong arm much more in our advertising.”

Whether it’s from advertising or word-of-mouth, Azar’s office has grown considerably over the past 20+ years. He has more than 60 attorneys on staff and 12 offices from Fort Collins to Pueblo. He’s a Trinidad native and said his business is strong in southern Colorado.

“A lot of people want to have an attorney in their neighborhood,” he said of the need for physical office space.

Asked if he ever gets tired of people calling him “Strong Arm,” or yelling at him on the street or at public events, Azar said no.

“I guess I’d walk down the street naked if it helps someone remember who to call so I can help them out,” Azar said. “I also get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re that attorney on TV.’”

Duber-Smith said the persona Azar projects is someone who’s almost willing to rough people up to get some money for his clients — which he likely wants, to appear tough to “battle” insurance companies for more settlement money.

“That’s his persona — that’s how he represents his brand,” Duber-Smith said.

The Colorado Springs-based personal injury law firm McDivitt has been airing its commercials daily since 1989, growing from a single office in La Junta to four locations with 14 attorneys and 70 employees, including in Denver and Aurora.

Founder Mike McDivitt started the ads as a way to expand beyond La Junta and attract new clients. The commercials, which feature a cartoon frog at the end that croaks “McDivitt,” all emphasize that clients don’t have to make any upfront payment to hire one of the firm’s lawyers, who all work on a contingency basis — meaning they don’t get paid until they either win a case or agree to a settlement.

“Through the years, more people (attorneys) are advertising on TV and it is harder to stand out, so somebody mentioned to me that they think of a frog when they hear our name, so we added the frog at the end of the ad,” said Lisa McDivitt Bush, the firm’s marketing director and Mike McDivitt’s daughter (her brother, David McDivitt, works for the firm and also appears in the ads).

The ads have become so important to McDivitt Law, the firm started making its own ads in its studios and production facility at its downtown Colorado Springs office seven or eight years ago, McDivitt Bush said.

“All of our TV ads are intended to convey our sincerity and the seriousness of what we do — we are a compassionate legal team that is accessible to you,” McDivitt Bush said. “Mike is still involved in every aspect — he reviews the cases and is in all of the commercials. We use clients in our ads, on occasion, but every situation is different.”

Advertisers, or marketing companies, are training consumers. Frogs for law firms, tigers for furniture, lizards for insurance, etc.

“They’ve conditioned us to feel certain ways about their brands,” Duber-Smith said. “It’s classical conditioning when you pair things right. So American Furniture kept coming at us with the tigers over and over again. Eventually, when you see a tiger here in Denver — what do we think of? That stuff you learn about Pavlov’s dog is mostly how we learn.”

Sometimes the persona is the owner of the company, so they rarely have someone telling them when it’s “time to go,” or if the ads aren’t working anymore.

“On the other hand, they wouldn’t keep doing it for decades if it didn’t work,” Duber-Smith said.

Though Jabs doesn’t appear in his commercials much, he did appear on a recent one letting customers know how much American Furniture Warehouse helped the victims of the Marshall fire. Warehouse officials did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Shane Co. officials declined to comment for this article.

Gazette reporters Wayne Heilman and Jessica Snouwaert contributed to this story.